This is a view of Adelaide Street through one of the glass panels of Grasett Park, created by the Canada Ireland Foundation and opened on July 16th 2021 to commemorate the many Irish refugees who died of typhus on their journey to Toronto in 1847, and to celebrate the medical staff, like Dr. George Robert Grasett, who succumbed while treating them. It is a timely monument to mark the contributions of front line medical workers. During the typhus epidemic, Toronto’s original General Hospital was overwhelmed and so they built fever sheds where dying patients lay on cots between sheets of cheesecloth intended to keep away the flies. The memorial’s glass panels are embedded with a lacey design which evokes the cheesecloth partitions of the earlier epidemic.
